What Is Japanese Cinema
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12424419 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rea Amit (0000-0001-5896-2913, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 597-621 |
| Publication date | 2019-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | positions asia critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1067-9847 • E-ISSN: 1527-8271 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/10679847-7726903 |
| OpenAlex | W2995103030 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 25 |
Imamura Taihei (1911–86) is considered by many to be the first film theorist in Japan, and he is known chiefly for his two grand theories on documentary film and animation. Yet, at the same time, Imamura also developed a third, no less ambitious theory, that of “Cinema and Japanese Art,” in which he specified the national characteristics of Japanese cinema. This essay concentrates on this third and less studied thesis. Although the argument Imamura puts forth in the thesis is elusive, aspects in it enable an interpretation of Japanese cinema along lines of phenomenological critical theory. From this perspective, it appears that Imamura establishes a theorization of national cinema that is predicated not on film as a product, or ontological aspects of what films project, but rather on the phenomenology of the film-watching experience. In effect, the thesis thus defines Japanese cinema not as the total sum of films produced in Japan, or by Japanese filmmakers, but as a shared watching experience of films regardless of their country of origin. Measuring Imamura’s thesis against other theories of Japanese national cinema that were published around the same time, during World War II, the essay argues that his theorization is in fact flexible enough to withstand more recent critique leveled against the notion of national cinema, and even allows radical new ways of thinking about national cinema in the contemporary moment of a new media environment and increasing transnational cultural flows
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Epistemology · Film studies · Film theory · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · National cinema · Phenomenology (philosophy · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy
Narrating the Nation-ality of a Cinema
Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
Ethnicity and Nationalism
Ethnicity and Nationalism
Formal and Transcendental Logic
Phenomenology in Japan
From Impurity to Historicity
The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism
Cinema and Nation
The Dawn That Never Comes
An Unholy Alliance of Eisenstein and Disney
Discourses of the Vanishing
The Concept of National Cinema
The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism
To the Distant Observer
The Culture of Japanese Fascism
Reading Fascism's Form
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |